The tidal wave of reviewer praise for the foul new HBO show Girls has washed up against a wall of resistance recently. But as far as I can tell, nobody, whether praising or blaming, has actually conveyed what this miserable crap-colored show is like to watch.
First scene: our homely heroine Hannah, played by writer-director-producer-monster Lena Dunham, is trying to persuade her parents to continue supporting her while she lives and perpetually interns in New York City, where everything looks drably brown. These are immediate tip-offs: we’re in mumblecore territory here. Mumblecore’s an indie film genre about contemporary affluent young white people who don’t know what to do with their lives and are generally dreary and despicable. And indeed, Lena Dunham is a mumblecore film director, who did Tiny Furniture in 2010.
So get yourself a bullet to bite, here comes the pain.
Next we have a scene featuring Hannah passively enduring rotten sex with a vile jerk named Adam (Adam Driver). Adam insists that Hannah pretend to be an 11-year-old girl he’s raping after abducting her on her way home from school, and she goes along: fine, whatever. Critic Dave Wiegand, in his rave review of the show, describes this as one of Adam’s “hysterically inappropriate fantasy scenes when he’s having sex.” Yeah, I guess Dave laughed and laughed at those.
Lena Dunham is getting hosannas from critics for exposing her nude doughy depressing body in humiliating ways throughout the show—makes it all so “real,” somehow. They’re all calling Dunham “the voice of her generation,” and maybe she’s the body of her generation too. She must’ve known she could count on critics to dutifully take dictation when she had her character Hannah ironically describe herself as “the voice of my generation…or of a generation.” You can picture them all noting it down carefully, muttering, “’Voice of generation’…oh, yeah, that is GOLD.”
There’s been no irony in the way show-creator Dunham augments her generational-voice status by making the PR rounds, talking about how she was inspired to create Girls because she never saw herself or her friends represented on TV shows. So she set out to remedy this by showcasing her particular demographic, the creepy white female.
The half-hour show drags on as you meet Hannah’s horrible friends, all of whom hold forth with bizarre self-importance on the topics of sex and abortion and AIDS and media and female identity, even the one who’s a cruel caricature of a provincial inexperienced girl (Zosia Mamet). There’s also the mean, square-jawed, gimlet-eyed “best friend” (Allison Williams), and the nasty Brit bitch (Jemima Kirke). All have hard poker faces and flat affectless voices. It’s impossible to imagine them laughing out loud, or relaxing, or having a nice meal or non-grim sex. Maybe they do those things in later episodes, but like I said, it’s tough to imagine.
The backlash against the show has been mainly about the all-whiteness of the cast, the way there are no people of color in Lena Dunham’s NYC except bit-part, background workers here and there. Personally I think people of color have dodged a bullet, and should celebrate their own non-representation in this TV-mumblecore hellscape. While this show slimes along, I like to imagine the whole rest of mixed-race NYC having a terrific time everywhere that Lena Dunham and her friends are not, letting Dunhamites move around in a permanent bubble of privileged-white-girl malevolence, shunned by all decent people.
In response to the criticism about the show’s blinding whiteness, one of the Girls writers, Lesley Arfin, tweeted sarcastically: “What really bothered me most about [the movie] Precious was that there was no representation of ME.”
Later she tried to erase it, but Max Read at Gawker did a fine job tracing Arfin’s history of vicious racist rhetoric. Unfortunately he followed it up by tying himself in knots trying to be “reasonable” about Arfin and Dunham and race and Girls:
Even if Arfin’s dabblings in race jokes and shock slurs are repellent, and beneath her, they’re appropriate; if Girls is the voice of this generation, it needs to give voice to this generation’s discomfort with race, one important manifestation of which is “hipster racism.” (See not justVice but the “Kill Whitey” parties, “Blackface Jesus,” and so on.)
Dunham, for her part, is not a “hipster racist.” When asked about her show’s lack of diversity, she’s been contrite and open to criticism. But her answers are still awkward, and reveal the other way that the kind of people depicted in Girls — should we say upper-middle-class urban millenials? — deal with race: by rendering the nonwhite members of their community — their “generation” — invisible…
Girls is the white people problems show; Precious is the black people problems movie; look, everyone’s been represented. Dunham is self-deprecating, Arfin self-aggrandizing, but the result is the same: there’s no room for people of color in the self-representation the two have created on HBO.
None of which makes Girls‘ portrayal of urban millennial life unrealistic. I’ve been to plenty of dinner parties where everyone was white, including myself. In fact, I’d argue that the show, taken as a whole, is even more accurate for these shortcomings. It really is the voice of a generation: a generation of white people who suck at talking about race.
It’s tough to know where to start grappling with the over-mildness of Read’s argument and the way it sails steadily off course, away from the most important point: the show as a whole is an evil lie. The racial stuff is just bitter top-dressing. Even if you can meet real Dunhamites at certain all-white dinner parties in NYC, why condemn a whole generation of unoffending females by claiming Dunham represents them? I know droves of twentysomething women, a lot of them nicer than I ever was at their age—and I was nice as hell. And they’re rushing around trying to be accomplished and succeeding to a degree that’s downright weird. There’s no reason to accept Girls as an ex cathedra pronouncement from “the voice of a generation” in the first place, much less hope people of color can get in on the horror of it all.
Dunham is already trying to shore up her voice-of-a-generation status by threatening to diversify the cast of Girls in subsequent seasons. Don’t cooperate, people of color! If she tries to cast you, punch her right in the face! Just watch the awful final scene in the first episode of Girls and you’ll see why you want nothing to do with this freak show!
The final scene features Hannah at a clinic where she’s getting tested for AIDS, a personal obsession of hers. There’s a woman of color as the gynecologist who’s forced to play the role as the wise-subaltern, feeding straight lines to Lena Dunham while squatting between her legs, so Dunham can toss off more of her dubious wit and wisdom about the harsh realities faced by snotty white mumblecore females today. I’ll let Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly, who loves the show, tell it:
“You could not pay me enough to be 24 again,” says Hannah’s OB/GYN. “Well, they’re not paying me at all” [Hannah] shoots back, feet in stirrups, gazing at the ceiling.
I don’t even get why that dialogue’s any good, but Tucker just can’t get over the genius of it.
Dunham…has created a character, Hannah, who’s vividly funny but also poignantly vulnerable and bristlingly smart. I’ve been reading that she’s a new voice for her generation, but I’m hear [sic] to tell ya: I ain’t in Dunham’s generation, and I think this show is superb….
Unemployed twenty-somethings and older: Start saving up for that HBO subscription….
Here Tucker illustrates the real menace of the show. It’s not enough that it’s regarded by many fatheads as practically unvarnished reportage, documenting the reality of young female life in contemporary America. On top of that, young women are urged to watch it in those terms. Y’see “girls,” it’s YOU. A barbarous insult! Them should be considered fightin’ words. But instead, gushing reviews, high-praise blogging and tweeting, all that voice-of-a-generation stuff, egging on gullible people to accept this heinous propaganda as authentic female experience.
One final note of gloom: it was only a few weeks ago that I started ranting about the dangers of mumblecore, but already this makes it official. The mumblecore cancer has metastasized. It’s spread from DIY indie films rarely seen outside film festivals to Judd Apatow-produced comedies playing in the smallest theaters in the multiplex and now to Judd Apatow-produced cable-TV shows in homes everywhere. It’s hopeless merely trying to cut out the tumorous growths. Time to crank up the radical radiation therapy, but we have to face facts: the prognosis is pretty damn negative.
Read more: girls, HBO, judd apatow, Lena Dunham, mumblecore, race, sex, Eileen Jones, Entertainment
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192 Comments
Add your own1. radii | April 26th, 2012 at 10:07 pm
even the ads you must endure for this dreck while waiting for Game of Thrones are repellent – those girls look like they smell bad … mumblecore and this latest incarnation of it are the culmination of the self-satisfaction of Gen-X, Gen-Y and now Millennials … they have no point-of-view and hence no politics but think that because they have some tech device in their possession that it makes them interesting … anytime you see the same name listed as director, producer, writer, actor (or 3 out of 4) for any kind of production it is nearly always a bad sign
2. rick | April 26th, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Against celebrating the dullard, even some sitcoms look like bold affirmations. I support anti-Mumblecore. Say something worth hearing, or you are boring like everyone, especially your fucking parents whose lives are repulsively insidid. Boring is standard-issue with humans.
3. Anarchy Pony | April 26th, 2012 at 10:51 pm
God this crap is insufferable. How are we ever supposed to make things better and have anything even remotely approaching cultural revolution, when the only shit people are exposed to is either promotion of or apathetic adherence to the status fucking quo? Humanities tombstone will read; “We didn’t know what we were doing, except for all those people we labeled as buzz-kills, who tried again and again to warn us that we were on an path to inevitable self destruction.”
4. Anarchy Pony | April 26th, 2012 at 10:52 pm
That should have read Humanity’s tombstone. Goddamned hands only do what my brain tells them about 70% of the time.
5. gatorade | April 26th, 2012 at 11:37 pm
It’s so fucking gross. At least the ugly gross people of kevin smith movies are regarded as the bottom of society. To think girls represents a generation is some kind of boomer smugness about how much better they were, it has to be.
6. Mr. Bad | April 26th, 2012 at 11:39 pm
Yes, the show sucks, so what’s on Eileen’s watch list? I’m guessing the shrill corporate (but with PC casting) “humor” of NEW GIRL. Gawker’s been pushing that Deshanel shit too something fierce, along with the race baiting rants during the Zimmerman affair. Eileen, you’re so predictable, and you’re trapped forever and ever and ever. Don’t forget that people like me will troll your articles forever out of envy.
7. The First Strelnikov | April 27th, 2012 at 12:10 am
Of course this “mumblecore” bullshit was going to hit the small screen; it’s cheap and easy to make, you can film in a pro-TV/movie town like New York, it has a built in audience. The only way out is to find where they are filming this bullshit, get the cast and crew together somehow, soak them in gasoline, and set them on fire. Or shoot them. All.
8. bulfinch | April 27th, 2012 at 12:34 am
The appetite for ugly never ceases to amaze.
What a lost bunch.
9. Boomtang | April 27th, 2012 at 12:59 am
these girls all remind me of dick cheney for some reason
10. horner | April 27th, 2012 at 1:21 am
Kill.. Kill! KILL!
11. apatheticfuturist | April 27th, 2012 at 3:35 am
Thank God!
Someone needed to burst the slick balloon of hype and obscurantism around this show, and expose the steel nipple that was feeding it. And Miss Jones as always you’ve defined exactly it. The tube, the nipple and the tank are pumping a poisonous gas with less substance than air.
The name mumble-core is appropriate though. It conjurs to mind someone yelling “WHAT?! Speak up! I can’t hear what you mean.” and the other person saying the undefinable thing louder and louder. At the heart of it there really is only a mumble an undefined half hearted unimportant wimper.
I guess it’s hard to believe someone could remake Slacker, do it shittier, heap on the entitlement, and turn it into an entire genre, but here we are. -1 for my genration.
12. apatheticfuturist | April 27th, 2012 at 3:36 am
Sorry one last thing.
Glory to Eilleen Jones!
13. Matt Cornell | April 27th, 2012 at 3:55 am
“her nude doughy depressing body”
Wow, weird policing of weird body policing in this review comment.
14. Down and Out of Sài Gòn | April 27th, 2012 at 4:07 am
Girls is the white people problems show; Precious is the black people problems movie;
What The Fuck? I know this article is about the movie, not the review – but seriously. On one hand you have 20-something middle-class women in a hell of their own making, and on the other hand, you have a woman raped by their own father (and infected with HIV) who brings the baby to term. Making the comparison is just insulting.
15. gc | April 27th, 2012 at 4:48 am
I’m waiting for the day the commentariat realizes that HBO was a mistake.
16. gc | April 27th, 2012 at 4:57 am
Yeah, well considering the vaguely 15th century setting of Game of Thrones and people’s bathing habits at the time…
As opposed to Game of Thrones, which has no point of view and hence no politics, but thinks that because they have – I dunno, swords? Dumb names? Raquel Welch costumes? – that it makes them interesting.
17. gc | April 27th, 2012 at 5:05 am
(continued)
Okay, actually that’s too generous. It’s perfectly clear why Game of Thrones thinks it’s interesting – it thinks cynicism is sophistication and sociopathy is character depth. Would that we were talking about unpretentious Conan type trash here.
18. Zhukhov | April 27th, 2012 at 5:33 am
I will bet that the obscenely self-important Ann Arbor residents and University of Michigan students must be loving this shitty TV show
19. Alvin Theocrat | April 27th, 2012 at 5:37 am
Why did I even read this? I’d never watch a show about poor, poor little rich white girls anyway.
20. TG | April 27th, 2012 at 5:53 am
Another thing about this show: despite the “poor unemployed/underemployed me” tone of the show, it features more nepotism than the internship programme at Vogue Magazine. The show’s leads are daughters of a successful artist, a successful playwright, a successful news anchorman, and a successful rock musician.
Beyond the larger problem of further entrenching the plutocracy, I don’t have much complaint about a talented young person taking advantage of family connections to get his first gig. But pretending afterward that it was a matter of blind luck and pure merit is just tacky:
http://gawker.com/5902401/how-fate-plucked-allison-williams-from-youtube-obscurity-and-dropped-her-on-her-dads-friends-tv-show
21. Oelsen | April 27th, 2012 at 6:11 am
yeah, sad.
At least the next Generation gets the whole clusterfuck and has something to tell *their* grand children.
22. Jedi Mind Trick | April 27th, 2012 at 6:18 am
Holy shit. Its self satire. It must be. Poe’s Law…
Oh god I’m getting a rope.
23. iCONOCLAST | April 27th, 2012 at 6:21 am
I say burn it! Burn it all down! Right to the fucking foundations!
24. G.G. Allin | April 27th, 2012 at 6:33 am
Oh my god, this show sounds truly dreadful. Thank the Lord I don’t have HBO. The dialogue sounds “witty” and “funny” the way the dialogue in “Juno” was supposed to be so. I get the feeling that the Millenials, or whatever they are called, are not going to produce anything at all interesting.
25. Peter | April 27th, 2012 at 7:02 am
I thought about trying to write about the bloggers’ brouhaha over this show, but then I thought, “Nope, Eileen Jones has it covered much better than I could hope to do.”
Here’s a question: is this a part of the David Brooks continuum? It’s certainly loathsome enough. The habits of affluent white urbanites, notionally shown as deficient but actually portrayed in a sickly loving way… I think the Inquisitional team said the same thing about “Stuff White People Like.” It’s all over the damned place, available in all kinds of different lifestyle flavors. For a good nerdish example, take a look at the webcomic “questionable content.”
Gawker and the rest of them are part of the problem. They don’t suck as bad as Dunham, et al — they get that there’s something wrong, and that’s a start — but they start out accepting all of the same stupid premises whenever one of these debates comes up. And I think that’s because, like their mumblecore cousins (and Brooksite older relations) they can’t actually look at power, because that would involve a real fight and not just “calling someone on their shit.”
26. D.H. | April 27th, 2012 at 7:19 am
Everytime I see one of these “mumblecore” projects I feel like grabbing the writer/director by the collar and screaming in their face like Brian Cox in Adaptation:
Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life!
27. Jesse | April 27th, 2012 at 7:40 am
Saw youtube clip. Dunham is female Jonah Hill except unfunny. Understood maybe ten percent of the annoying mumblelogue. Why do so many young women affect this disgusting emptyvee-speak? They apparently ape each other out of some distorted perception of cool. Like tattoos.
28. Trevor | April 27th, 2012 at 8:02 am
I like that Eileen points out how there are plenty of millenials not like this crew of Sylvia Plath wannabes, it’s just that they never get to be on TV. How about the twenty-somethings that served in Iraq or Afghanistan? Or the twenty-somethings supporting their downsized parents? That’s what the generation is really dealing with, this show is just more yuppie navel-gazing.
29. jimmythehyena | April 27th, 2012 at 8:14 am
Without any ideal life becomes cruel and absurd. What to do? Let cruelty and absurdity become your ideals and then, with the right doses of prescription medication and alcohol, it all becomes kind of amusing. Given of course that you don’t have to live in America where this type of female has way to much power (or have some “expat job” [call center or teaching English as a second language anyone] where bizarely they have even more power than in the States [my theory on this, it helps people in other countries to deal with their feelings inadequacy vis a vis THE GREAT SATAN to have some severely neurotic sexually confused female as a representative of the immensity of OUR EVIL?)]
30. Gene Hoglan | April 27th, 2012 at 8:43 am
Even though she had what’s likely a dangerous level of plastic surgery, I’m just glad Rachel Dratch is finally getting some work.
31. T. AKA Ricky Raw | April 27th, 2012 at 9:08 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have been confused as hell as to why black girls even WANT to be part of this show. Someone needs to tell people that not all attention is good attention.
Too many people have either been praising or bashing this show based on feminism and racism issues, and have been ignoring the fact that the show just isn’t funny. There are so many legitimate reasons to hate this show that it baffles me to see so many articles choosing to focus on racism of the creators or on whether or not people who hate the show are just hating it due to misogyny.
This show is accurate, but only for a certain demographic of self-important women in New York. My fear is that eventually this type of woman will start being seen as something for women to aspire to.
32. Ozinator | April 27th, 2012 at 9:18 am
I get that Jews are not a race but a sometimes religious, non-inclusive tribal culture… but it reads weird to have a show like this described as being an inaccurate portrayal of white girls… however inaccurate it may be for big city Jewish girls. Obviously there is great influence on culture from this tiny group but how many non Jewish people watch it or (Seinfeld) and say, “those crazy white people”? I love watching the guy’s sarcastic, self deprecating humor, but I don’t relate to Woody Allen like I’m sure many in that culture do
33. ribbon | April 27th, 2012 at 9:45 am
I watched the 1st episode of this show (HBO put the pilot on youtube), and it just struck me as fake as hell. It presents itself as being a realistic portrayal of a certain downwardly-mobile-upper-middle-class-white-female-20-something experience of New York. OK, fine; that’s a pretty damn narrow experience to be trying to channel, but it’s legitimate fodder for storytelling if done well.
The problem is that the writers/makers of this show, in particular Dunham, are not really downwardly-mobile-upper-middle-class. They’re just plain upper class. They have no clue what 20-something downward mobility is actually like. And, in the episode, this ignorance was glaring. If Hannah has zero income and is being cut off by her parents, then there’s no WAY she can afford to live in Greenpoint with just one roommate. Her boyfriend Adam only has an income of 800 dollars a month — and yet he has an apartment all to himself — apparently also in Greenpoint. The reality of NYC real estate is that you’d have to live HOURS outside the city along the commuter rail for that budget to make any sense.
This may seem like a small issue to get hung up on, but the fact of the matter is the experiences of inegalitarian real estate, spatial isolation, long mindnumbing commutes, and roommate overcrowding are actually *central* to the downwardly-mobile-20-something experience of life in New York! Dunham and her fellow writers clearly have no concept of this whatsoever. In fact, we never see any of the characters riding the subway and/or biking or doing anything conveying “time spent in transit”; instead we see them spending tons of time inside exposed-brick apartments and Midtown hotel rooms. Presumably this is how Dunham, as a child of the elite, experienced NYC growing up, but it’s ludicrous to imagine that this is how 20-somethings struggling to make rent experience the city.
Dunham also patronizingly imagines that the principal way downwardly mobile 20-somethings make their money is by “tricking” their parents and grandparents into sending them extra checks each month. Totally patronizing. Ugh! And this isn’t even getting into the wooden, depressing characters, or the show’s anti-black *and* anti-asian racism.
34. lars | April 27th, 2012 at 10:18 am
Mumblecore is the new incarnation of Disco.
They had to do 3 attempts before Donna Summer showed up and made Disco palatable for consumption.
Be prepared for a lot more of this Mumbleshit from the Elites and Banksters.
35. Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg | April 27th, 2012 at 10:52 am
I’m generation X (remember us? we’re the ones who invented irony!) and I am seeing some familiar contours here. My own demographic wallowed in a similar angst. We never got high budget TV shows on cable but we did get books like the self-pitying navel gazing like the epynomous ‘Generation X’. So now cultural cycles repeat so quick that we’ll be on a perpetual spin cycle. A friend of mine and I used to write movie scripts that looked a lot like this. Sadly, we were born 20 years too early to cash in. At the time we knew no sensible audience would really be able to ingest such drifting, aimless day-dreamage.
36. Ella Farts-Gerald | April 27th, 2012 at 10:56 am
Eh? I thought this was just a mildly funny way to help pass the time between GAME OF THRONES and THE KILLING. Lotta grief over a trifle. No black people? Didn’t notice until a bunch of critics complained. However, I’d gladly trade GIRLS for more CURB or restoring the tragically-murdered DEADWOOD
37. Ol'ga's Mom | April 27th, 2012 at 11:29 am
The next geat thing . . . mumblecore snappers? Spare us. Ames & Co. should start a high-class, revolving snapper internship program. You know, bring in a new Russian Ol’ga every month, post a few pics, maybe get a little face time with Oprah and Ellen. And why, you ask? Why not? Because no Ol’ga has ever told a lie, and Russian snappers have never told lies. They are what they are; and for that, our world is a better place.
Remember (and cherish) my mom Ol’ga’s mantra: “Я буду сосать свой член на 50 копеек.”
38. Dr. Robert | April 27th, 2012 at 11:51 am
Of course it’s great to see a show produced by a woman, because the gender gap in film and television production is a serious problem. That doesn’t mean anything made by a woman needs to be praised uncritically, particularly for its womanness. I’d rather have a bad television show about women produced by a woman than a bad television show produced by a man, but it seems to me that the simplified mainstream “feminist” messaging that has to accompany any work like this just reinforces gender stereotypes while ruining the show. Women desperately need to be demystified, not made to feel bad if they don’t wear hip clothes and enjoy porn-sex.
39. kms | April 27th, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Please tell me these whiny, pathetic white chicks aren’t the voice of my generation. Pretty pretty please. I guess the people I want to be the voice of my generation are struggling to survive grad school, or volunteering somewhere that they are needed, or are traveling to see beyond what they’ve been taught, or are working hard at a job they hate trying to pay down student loans or credit cards. They sure as hell arent trying to enshrine the importance of their “experience”. These spineless, pasty, “how could life be worth living if I can’t be a brooklyn hipster?” girls straight up make me want to punch my tv in the face. I may have no room to talk because I didn’t even want to try to make it through the episode. I know we have to have some good young storytellers out there, please step the fuck up.
40. FrankZappasGuitar | April 27th, 2012 at 12:39 pm
I’m cool with this show’s existence cuz I don’t own a TV.
41. Mason C | April 27th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Damn you, Eileen. Now I want to have a look because Girls is ripe for satire.
The Left needs to make Manufacturing Consent x Kentucky Fried Movie – skits of Americans puzzling out their political fate in a surreal fog, then cut-scenes of mumblecores run over by buses or heavy equipment. A cast of lefty authors can bust through bookcases full of rubbish like Big Jim Slade.
42. DeeboCools | April 27th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Ok, I haven’t seen the show so I hold no hostility towards it yet. However, calling Lesley Arfin’s tweet “vicious racist rhetoric”? You’re just being silly.
43. MikeJake | April 27th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Not to go all anti-feminist, or paint the interests of women with a broad-brush, but I just can’t understand why women have such a yearning for being “represented” in popular culture and media. I get the sense that it’s less an interest in having people they can relate to on TV, that it’s primarily driven by a desire to check-off achievements on the “We’ve Arrived and We Matter” list. I mean, are women actually genuinely entertained by shows like Two Broke Girls?
It’s like when the whole controversy about August National not allowing women members got dredged up again because some snooty female CEO didn’t get her complementary membership. Who gives a shit? 99% of white men can’t be members there. A woman gaining membership would symbolize nothing. But it’s on the checklist, so they have to die on that hill.
44. Mydick | April 27th, 2012 at 4:42 pm
its like a war of the worlds on mydick
45. ariot | April 27th, 2012 at 4:44 pm
So does HBO’s Girl’s put another mark in the Huxley was a god-damn prophet column?
46. Exi | April 27th, 2012 at 6:32 pm
You seem to have missed the first episode. The second episode had the OBGYN oneliners and the pedophiliac dirty talk you are referring to.
In the pilot episode, the doughy protagonist demands $1100 a month from her parents basically for doing nothing, and throws a hissy fit when they turn her down.
She also steals the tip her parents left for the maid, and actually leaves the empty envelope that has ‘Tips’ written on it in the hotel room (fuck you, lady who cleans up other people’s shit and cum soaked sheets for minimun wage! I’m a starving artiste!), oh and hey, hello PC-police, look at our black person here: a bum asking for money!
Maybe he and the asian nerd girl that had one line earlier in that episode can hang out and talk about ethnic stuff like photoshop and fried chicken.
There also was a lot of miserable fucking in the pilot. Why does this show try to make it look like no one really enjoys sex? Well, besides the guys, of course.
And why did the show go through the trouble to establish a potentially controversial and interesting abortion storyline, only to chicken out at the last minute and have the girl magically menstruate before she goes to the clinic?
Thank god the lead character didn’t flippantly murder her precious embryo, we can all still relate to her and like her without having to think too hard about difficult shit.
No. Fuck my generation. I’d rather watch Golden Girls reruns. Dorothy never took shit from Stanley, Rose knew she was an idiot and Blanche liked to bang random guys for fun.
Why can’t we have nice things anymore?
47. ajax151 | April 27th, 2012 at 7:01 pm
Thanks Eileen, this is the first time that I downloaded a show for the express purpose of hating on it. Boy, was that satisfying. The show is beyond crap coloured, it is so epically provincial and conceited that it makes you wonder how critics can nod their heads at the label “the voice of her generation”
Only goes to show, the vast majority of people who become film critic come out of such a narrow middle class existence that it’s little wonder the movies being made today are so shit.
48. Marcos Navarro | April 28th, 2012 at 1:22 am
This shit may be good to rage at, but you guys need to stop taking it so seriously. I bet you the only people who watch this are stupid fucking hipsters and stupid fucking critics, and we all concluded long ago that they’re lost causes.
As mentioned by Eileen this doesn’t speak for a generation, and it won’t be watched by a generation. Maybe to those of you who live in New York or are involved in the industry may view this as the next big thing, but outside of your relatively small circles, nobody gives a shit about this show.
49. Kennyboy | April 28th, 2012 at 1:43 am
mumbling hipsters ruin everything, again.
cue Rory Breaker: “Is this some white cunt’s joke that black cunts don’t get? ‘Cause Im not fucking laughing Ni-ko-las.”
50. jimmythehyena | April 28th, 2012 at 4:21 am
People are calling for the death of irony. Well the solution is obvious, Kill Whitey. Go to a kill whitey party with some Glocks and open fire. If you can’t recruit some niggaz from the ghetto maybe do it yourself in black face. Or would that too be some sort of meta-irony?
51. Zhu Bajie | April 28th, 2012 at 5:17 am
Maybe this is why the Mexicans are staying home. They are no longer deluded by US movies and TV.
52. Peter | April 28th, 2012 at 6:19 am
@Trevor: or if you wanted to go more speculative, one about some clever 20-somethings (preferably heavy on the Iraq and Afghanistan vets) putting the Mao/Collins playbook into action… Probably too rough/interesting for American tv, though, and if it was written wrong it’d be awful.
53. Flatulissimo | April 28th, 2012 at 6:37 am
The whole thing is a scam. This show has been covered ad nauseam on virtually every crappy internet site (Gawker, Salon, Huffpo, etc.) and reviewers are gushing about it nonstop, despite the fact that only a couple episodes have aired. But I don’t know anybody in the real world who has actually watched it. I have plenty of Facebook friends in the target demographic who would normally eat this shit up, and none of them have posted about it. They watch Game of Thrones, but nobody is posting about Girls, even the 20 year old white girls. (Of course, maybe they just don’t suck.)
It’s the opposite of word of mouth. This is top-down corporate advertising force-feeding. Completely the opposite of how Apatow came to prominence, with Freaks and Geeks. That show went on to have a cult following in spite of the network failing to promote it, and even actively sabotaging it (it was also actually good).
I don’t buy it. If the show was really good, I would have people telling me how great it is who weren’t being paid to do so, like it was with Breaking Bad and Eastbound and Down. The whole fake buzz with Girls reeks of desperation.
54. pearl fiddler queen | April 28th, 2012 at 9:18 am
@31
This *is* an interesting question. Just how *strange* are us jews to you goyim? Do you watch Seinfeld and think, “those crazy jews?” i’ve always wondered…
FYI the biological notion of race has been debunked, even when talking racism we’re talking cultures. where i live a little under half of all african american males are jamaican, but most wouldn’t admit to it under torture. they were teased as “yardies” growing up. they’re part of black culture now.
anwyays, jews been white for a moment now, though there’s an occassional and refreshing blip in the matrix, so thanks for that.
55. tom melarge | April 28th, 2012 at 11:52 am
After reading this article I scrolled up to the picture of the 4 girls on the bench, which I somehow didn’t notice the first time through. When it rolled onto my screen, I literally shuddered. My body slightly convulsed and my face contorted. I think this is actually the healthiest reaction to the kind of cultural sickness we are dealing with. The same kind of reaction a healthy person gets when looking at pictures of disfigurements or terminal illness cases. Spiritual and intellectual cripples being paraded around in our carnival freak show of a society.
Besides, if you want white people problems in New York, Larry David already did that shit.
56. radii | April 28th, 2012 at 1:04 pm
this show has earned its hate because it takes up media space and it is bad … cool is a feedback loop and it’s been stuck in tight circle (or K-hole if you will) for a long time … the thrift-store fashion of the early punk days (which had irony, a nod to history and was affordable) has held on to the point that some of the contestants on these sewing shows throw that crap down the runways as wannabe couture … remember when fads lasted a few weeks or months, maybe a year or two? Sagging has lasted what – 20 years? (although the pants are twice as low as they were in Boys In The Hood) … South Park brilliantly skewered the Slacker commercialized artsy-fartsy film student slug population with their Gay Cowboys Eat Pudding bit but it speaks to a larger point – nerds can’t really move up – they move laterally and become “artsy” and that is what has been celebrated so much with the browns and drab of Gen-X/Y/Millennial filmmakers – all that concrete and negative space and browns in PT Anderson’s movies – ugh … Ugly is not an aesthetic and these auters and wannabe ironic commentators are not using it to make any point – they are glorifying ugly and lame and have been for quite a while now – Girls is huge boil – a glaring symptom of this disease
57. Mr. Bad | April 28th, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Speaking of envy its obvious there’s a lot of it here in my pants. Man, I wonder how great it is to be Eileen and have everyone’s respect the way that she does. How many people care about what I say? I can tell you: two. Me and my mommy.
58. hon kee | April 28th, 2012 at 3:59 pm
ha maybe i’m just a pollyanna but i feel like most of the hate this show earns is totally misplaced. the writers, to me, seem to be totally in on the joke of how petty and self-induced these characters’ “problems” are.
complaining about the show’s characters being whiny bourgeoisie brats strikes me as like complaining about the characters on seinfeld being self-centered assholes
59. Jesse | April 28th, 2012 at 5:43 pm
@54
We’re all the same, right? Only an idiot would believe that groups of people are essentially different or extend the idea of family to ridiculous lengths to include a concept of “people.” Right???
60. Fred | April 28th, 2012 at 6:27 pm
My guess is that people in my generation are going to have to wait a few years before anything worthwhile that we produce gets attention. Back when the culture moved too fast for any incestuous artistic oligarchy to control it, someone talented like Hunter Thompson could capture that energy and write something like Hell’s Angels at age 25 to popular acclaim, or a Scorsese could make a film like The Big Shave at 25. Society was such that the people who produced the art would also often have it published or promoted by others in their own generation. Now that the ranks have closed at the top, it’ll either take a while before anything interesting that we make claws its way to the top of the old cultural institutions or until we create our own institutional vehicles for promoting these things ourselves.
There are young people out there who are producing and succeeding- like Eileen, I know a fair number of them personally- but the cultural Illuminati doesn’t hear them; and there are others who do need to pay off their student debts or go through their socially engendered twenty-something angst (but quietly and with dignity, unlike the mumblecore hacks) before they create something interesting. Until then, we’re going to have to slog through a lot of “voice of my generation” crap that isn’t the voice of our generation at all but is the voice of what boring old people think is our generation articulated through a young person serving as a mouthpiece like Dunham.
For what it’s worth, I graduated from the same college Dunham did (Oberlin) about a year or two after she did, and most people I talk to who either go there or went there who saw Girls or Tiny Furniture didn’t like either of them. The only two people I know who did, tellingly, live or grew up in NYC. That means that even in a small (under 3,000 students) fairly elitist liberal arts college like Oberlin that, like Williamsburg or Portland, is where a lot of the hipster mumblecore types congregate, this kind of thing is mostly loathed. That should give you a sense of just how incestuous this stuff is, but also provide some hope for the future.
61. Tommo | April 28th, 2012 at 11:32 pm
What we need is some sort of Chairman Mao cultural revolution- stamping on people’s faces, masses of angry people drifting around with rocket launchers and cro-bars for even the slightest hint of bullshit that pisses them off. Yeah
62. CensusLouie | April 28th, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Yeah I can’t think of any more force fed corporate promoting than a thumbs up from Entertainment Weekly.
We’ve gone from media with phoney supermodel protagonists to the other equally awful extreme: intentionally overly frumpy women. It all started with Charlize Theron in Monster. If an actress goes out of her way to look awful, then it must be acting gold! An entire show with a bunch of awful looking women must be platinum!
A similar trend happened with media criticism. The early internet allowed everyone to get on a soapbox and vomit hate on everything, but now we’ve gone to the opposite extreme where the slightest artistic criticism is chastised and people like Max Read desperately tip toe to avoid being labeled a “hater”, a phrase embraced by insular twats who always insist the emperor is wearing a fabulous gown.
63. Mitchell | April 29th, 2012 at 12:26 am
Could one of you knowingly-acerbic comment-section culture critics do a compare-and-contrast between Kids (1995 film) and Girls (2012 TV series)? So far all I know is that one features the drug-assisted date-rape of a pre-teen, and the other one features adults roleplaying the rape of a kidnapped schoolgirl. I want to know things like 1) is this progression a sign of increased or decreased depravity? 2) is this progression simply a feature of American audiovisual culture or does it reflect a change in real-life American society during this period?
64. Bob | April 29th, 2012 at 2:41 am
My God, I watched the entire first episode on youtube.
Just push the fucking button. Put us all out of our misery.
65. Bob | April 29th, 2012 at 2:55 am
@48
You say these guys don’t speak for our generation? Who does, then?
I saw a whole entire episode. Free on Youtube. I’m pretty sure that it fucked me for life. I think about our country. I think about our world. I think about my generation.
I then realize that I envy the dead.
66. Ozinator | April 29th, 2012 at 6:00 am
@54,
I was talking culture, so no need for the lesson (which misses that racism still exists). The article mentioned the inaccuracy of the show portraying “white girls”, when the show is about a narrow segment of girls (which again, may or may not be accurate behavior of twenty something Jewish girls). You did read the part about a black woman saying no one represented her? So I’m saying that while all European Jews are “white people”, not all white people are Jews- and just like the black girl said about her “race”/culture, are not represented by the show.
Though you missed the point with your questions, I would say that once understanding a particular culture, “strange” becomes demystified. But to pick something out that many “goyim” find strange about your culture, a quick look at your nasty post is something. attacking with “goyim” while acting the victim and at the same time saying we’re all the same.
67. Vendetta | April 29th, 2012 at 8:40 am
@33
Thanks for contributing that, it was a good addition.
68. gc | April 29th, 2012 at 9:01 am
@33
Just wanted to express appreciation for your beautiful comment.
And yeah, about the anti-Asian thing – Jesus Christ. Oh well, at least now we have a better idea of how those early 20th century “pushy, ill mannered Jews being more successful than the Christians” jokes felt at the time.
69. gc | April 29th, 2012 at 11:27 am
@66
^ So you’re implying that this is a particularly Jewish tendency.
Just to be clear, this makes you stupid and evil.
And I feel a bit queasy contemplating whatever snake pit of resentments and superstitions in your mind led you to conclude (back in comment 32) that Girls is supposed to be about “big city Jewish girls”. There’s nothing particularly Jewish (or non-Jewish) about any of the four main characters, and Dunham’s parents are pure WASP caricatures.
70. Ozinator | April 29th, 2012 at 12:18 pm
@69,
I can think of many non Jewish whites who act like victims (when they aren’t) who say racist shit, but they sure don’t try to sell multiculturalism or a sense that their particular culture is the same as everyone else’s. There’s plenty about Euro/US Jewish culture I love (I already mentioned the self deprecating sarcastic humor, I love kosher food, open mindedness about sex, love of education) and sure there is plenty crossover saying that this stuff is not only practiced or loved by Jews. Goyim is not a nice word. Pretending to be insulted and calling me evil isn’t nice either. You are not a very nice person
I stand corrected that the lead Jewish writer, director, actor has WASP parents in the show. I never watched it…So I guess they didn’t nail the WASP girl culture in the show then?
71. um.whatever | April 29th, 2012 at 12:48 pm
am i the only one on here sensing the tragi-comic irony of a comment thread that collectively mocks the pointless, shallow, vapidity of the mumblecore generation as it engages in a cultural practice (the f*cking comment thread) of the most impotent and pointless sort?
72. gc | April 29th, 2012 at 4:04 pm
I’m not “insulted” (never mind pretending to be), I’m repulsed.
You are evil. My guess is a diffident, quietly seething kind of evil; a social failure who, seeking an explanation for why the cool kids don’t like him, has let his mind be infiltrated and twisted by the cult of anti-Jewishness.
Be aware of what you are, and may the discomfort of that knowledge lead to reflection and reform.
Yeah, I hear you, man. Personally, I’m an appreciator of black culture. I mean, I like soul food and Chris Rock – and they’re such amazing dancers!
Why, I’ll bet some of your best friends are Jewish.
^ Leaving aside the stupid/malicious implications about Jews, I’ll point out that there is an entire tribe of disproportionately white people who do exactly this, and they’re called libertarians.
73. gc | April 29th, 2012 at 4:06 pm
@71
Yes. Yes you are.
Here, Roy Orbison wrote a song for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjq4wYuwgxs
74. Shazza | April 29th, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Thank you for this. Jezebel has been the #1 cheerleader of this show since the first ad. I saw it and honestly thought it was 1 girl in several situations, didn’t realize there were 4. Whatever. I decided they obviously weren’t trying to appeal to me so I don’t watch.
75. pearl fiddler queen | April 29th, 2012 at 7:34 pm
and the point goes to… GC.
@59 are you calling the idea of “a people” stupid? it’s preposterous, i know, but when all of your gransparents’ cousins (73 on the grandfather’s side, total on grandmother’s side unknown), minus one, are murdered, you’re raised by parents absolutely paranoid to the core, to the point of celebrating the genocide of the palestinian people, in a culture where you’re, on the one hand given the privileges of whiteness, and on the other hand made the butt of jokes, not cus people hate jews, per se, but just cus they’re funny, you’re awarded with certain abilitites to bait a kike hater, masquerading as a culturally sensitive and inquisitive individual, to the point where, you know, he admits to **loving** **jewishness** i mean, who doesn’t? jews are just so damn diligent. i hope the realization that you’re like him (them? the jews?? NOOOOO!!!!) makes you roundly uncomfortable. don’t look in the mirror. it bites kikes.
76. um.whatever | April 29th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
@58 I am with you. Seems pretty obvious. For example: the doughy one (the main character) steals the $20 tip left for housekeeping at the hotel her parents stay in. Do the anti-Girls contingent here actually believe the show’s creator means for the audience to identify with such a pathetic and selfish character? Obviously Girls is meant, at least to some degree to be satire/criticism. Really, is it too much to ask viewers to develop criteria for evaluating art that doesn’t amount to the boring formula “It is good because I can relate/It is bad because I cannot.” This predictably dull standard for evaluation belies more self centeredness than even the shows’ characters display.
77. um.whatever | April 29th, 2012 at 9:09 pm
my guess is most of the critics here secretly find the repulsive characters remind them a bit too much of themselves. the real life targets of this show’s biting critique don’t appear to exist in real life, much like how we are all aware that there are hipsters everywhere, yet no one seems to think /she herself IS one. another interesting point: a majority of the shows detractors bemoan the ‘laziness’ of the characters, perpetuating the life of the increasingly false dictum that hard work leads to success and rewards. christ, if yr gonna have an opinion, at least put some thought into it. maybe the show is meant as a critique of how neo-liberalism has turned young ‘creative’ new york into an army of underpaid, insecure, creative consumers that have no chance of living the meaningful and fulfilling lives of NYC artists/bohemians circa the 60s/70s/80s.
78. Ozinator | April 29th, 2012 at 9:56 pm
@72
I know you have determined me to be stupid, so trying to point out your mistakes may be futile…
The kind of libertarians you mention most certainly do not see themselves as proponents of multiculturalism. I suppose it’s necessary to tell someone as frothed up as you that I do not defend this sort?
I in no way implied a patronizing love of Jewish culture as you just did with black culture.
You are the racist thinking you have been wronged and it is a peculiar and particular trait of your secular and non-secular mythology. Even discussing it is taboo
If you could let go of your hate for one moment , you may be smart enough to see what is being said to you.
79. radii | April 29th, 2012 at 10:33 pm
@60
“My guess is that people in my generation are going to have to wait a few years before anything worthwhile that we produce gets attention”
Nonsense, Fred. Compelling told stories are riveting and people show interest. What has happened since Gen-X is that youth totally sold out – just look at hip-hop: everything is totally commodified for money (the most shameless example was in the 90s when Ice Cube, the “poet laureate of rap” said he didn’t put the more socially-conscious lyrics from his albums in his live shows because the audience came to hear the “muthafucka-bitch-boom-boom” … civil rights era black folks were fighting and dying for something real and if one of their leaders had a captive audience then, absolutely, you would hear the socially-conscious messages) … since Gen-X, youth have become too cool to care, posing is an end in itself – these days if you have to do more than push a button or tweet something then revolution is too hard and you might not look cool doing it … try this experiment – other than in science and sports name one great person in any field under 50 (who’s work will last the ages): poet, artist, film director, social leader, humanitarian, painter, novelist, thinker, environmentalist, political visionary
80. James | April 30th, 2012 at 8:21 am
Thank God someone finally called it like it is. This show has the worst case of PR-induced “The Emperor has no clothes” syndrome I’ve ever seen in my life.
Fewer people are watching it than visit your average Wal-Mart in Sioux Falls on an average Sunday night. You would think that, conservatively speaking, a 75% outright hostility and loathing of this show in conjunction with dreadful ratings would be enough to get the critics and HBO to re-think this and think maybe, just maybe they over-hyped it. But no.
You go anywhere, Slate, IMDB, even Entertainment Weekly the one week they covered it and the comments are 90% negative. Of the positive comments generally 4 out of every 5 haven’t actually watched the show.
The fact that there’s any breathing human being who cannot see this monstrous program is likely one of the 3 worst shows ever to grace a television screen (and the pilot was easily the worst pilot ever shot let alone aired) makes me lose a little less of my small, remaining hope in humanity.
81. Bosco | April 30th, 2012 at 10:45 am
I thought it was funny at first, thinking it was a satire, pointing out the pathetic-ness of many pseudo-creatives and young adults these days, but I think it’s suppose to be serious. I see a great satire, but I don’t think the writer intended that nor will her fans see it as one big joke.
82. Yep | April 30th, 2012 at 12:14 pm
“All have hard poker faces and flat affectless voices. It’s impossible to imagine them laughing out loud, or relaxing, or having a nice meal or non-grim sex.”
Sounds like NYC to me.
83. Rachel | April 30th, 2012 at 12:34 pm
I definitely think this show is target to a specific audience (which in the end may kill it) but as a white, single, 20-something female with a mediocre job…I can completely relate.
Most of you probably don’t even live in NYC, unfortunately white-single females living in NYC getting help from their parent is very normal. Many of you missed the fact (since you seem to be so obsessed with it) she does not even live in the upper east side or in Manhattan for that fact, but in Brooklyn.
A lot of the topics they cover, I’ve never talked about out loud but have experienced. “the stuff up around the sides” is probably my favorite topic of conversation (see episode 2)
The fact that so many of you have problems with the show only white girls, I’m glad its that way. And to say that black girls wouldn’t ever take a role on the show is bias too, why can’t we have a show with 4 white main characters. There is no reason to have token black (you know it’s true).
Of course we know 20 something, white females, are not the only group of people living in NYC. But I am glad to see a show that focus on this demographic. Everything show does not need to appeal to every group of people in the world, that’s not the point.
I think the show is comical, relate-able, original and if you are pissed about it – You are just jealous that you aren’t a 20-something, single female living in NYC with the help of mom & dad while trying to find a dream job.
84. gc | April 30th, 2012 at 1:03 pm
@78
I’m not Jewish, you idiot bigot.
Yes they do.
Sure. Because I professed to like stereotypically black things, while you professed to like stereotypically Jewish things.
All the difference in the world.
85. James | April 30th, 2012 at 4:20 pm
@ Rachel. Jealous? Ha! Of that character’s miserable life. This character hates her OWN life. Even Dunham would laugh at you for that one. No one’s jealous of her or the character. If anything it sounds like YOU identify with the character and are trying to defend her. If your life is anything like hers let me give you some polite advice: Find a way to lead a less miserable existence. Just because your in your 20s and live in NYC your life doesn’t have to suck this bad. But no one else is interested in it, if you’re a writer and doing as terrible of a job creating visual diarrhea anywhere near as bad as what Dunham, Apatow and HBO are consistently putting on screen with this show .
People are mad that this crap show is not only on the air, but was over-hyped as being even watchable let alone show of a generation status.
It’s laughable that this many critics are actually dumb enough to like this. Their fawning is made even less credible by the fact that they all use the same superlatives and in many cases the same statements simply phrased slightly differently to praise this garbage.
It’s also funny that critics never get around to saying WHAT is good about this show. It’s always “brave” (please, even FNL a dramas have done abortion by now), “cutting-edge” (it’s not, we’ve seen self-loathing, frumpy lead characters before, this is not 10 years ago) and somehow “ironic (it’s not, it’s just bad).
Ironic? What’s ironic about this show is not the re-tread Gen-X wannabe style cynicism, it’s that a show this bad received this much ‘critical praise’ and wound up this horrible.
TV critics have now lost whatever shred of remaining credibility they might have had left. The fact that they’re too dumb to realize they embarrassed themselves doesn’t change the fact that they have and that the show is horrifyingly bad. Sadly for them the vast majority of the public realizes that.
86. Ozinator | April 30th, 2012 at 4:46 pm
@84
Joe Biden, is that you???
87. commey | April 30th, 2012 at 6:23 pm
And she used to work for your old buddy Gavin McInnes. Its slightly easier to criticize a TV show than it is to get your own show on HBO while in your mid-20s and write well enough to convince loads of people that your output is generationally significant. Haters gon’ hate but honestly how many shows currently on TV have more artistic validity than this show? In absolute terms, the criticism is understandable, but the set to which it can reasonably be compared contains American Idol and The Mentalist, not The Brothers Karamazov. How is Girls even slightly more intellectually offensive than the vast majority of TV?
88. TD | April 30th, 2012 at 6:48 pm
Who jewed up this comment thread? Someone jewed up the comment thread!!!!
Someone hurry the fuck up and give this comment thread its own homeland, already!
JEWS!!
89. gc | April 30th, 2012 at 7:11 pm
@86
Translation: “Shit, I fucked up. Um… um… Joe Biden!”
90. Davrus | April 30th, 2012 at 9:21 pm
@76 I think a lot of the controversy comes from the context in which it exists. It has been billed as the voice of this generation. So who does it bill as the voice of the current generation, A group of “whiny bourgeoisie brats” whose problems are “petty and self-induced”. I.E. not young people who have suddenly left college to find out that not only it is impossible to find a decent job, they are also saddled with a huge student debt which they will never be able to pay off and will be an anchor around there neck for the rest of their life’s, young people whose who’s parent themselves may be losing their homes. In other words the voice of this generation is a group of girls which republican could in good conscience say, these people need the stern discipline of the market, and should have there student loan interest rates doubled.
91. Ozinator | May 1st, 2012 at 5:20 am
@89,
not really. That you’re misunderstanding, feigning offense, and not Jewish is making people who call you goyim pretty damn right!
as far as fucking up? pull the rip cord on libertarians thinking of themselves as multicultural. “they do”! You know that’s not true. Very silly
92. DeeboCools | May 1st, 2012 at 6:51 am
88 has it all figured out.
93. Flatulissimo | May 1st, 2012 at 6:51 am
@87 – “Haters gon’ hate but honestly how many shows currently on TV have more artistic validity than this show?”
Um, all of them, Katie?
Like I mentioned earlier, as examples of shows that had real, rather than manufactured, word of mouth – Breaking Bad and Eastbound and Down.
A web-based comedy like The Guild also has more artistic validity than this show. It built up a genuine following rather than being force fed to the public from above, was created by a young female, AND is actually funny. Look at how much the production values improved from season to season – that was paid for from donations from fans. And Felecia Day hasn’t gotten the benefit of a non-stop big media snowjob to promote her show.
So there are plenty of examples. Hell, if I was a young woman I’d embrace Dee Reynolds from It’s Always Sunny as generational spokesperson before I would Dunham’s character. At least that show is funny.
But again, no 20-ish women are actually embracing these characters, the show is being forced upon the public in an old-school media blitz.
Also, what #90 said:
“In other words the voice of this generation is a group of girls which republican could in good conscience say, these people need the stern discipline of the market, and should have there student loan interest rates doubled.”
94. ct | May 1st, 2012 at 7:06 am
That’s the thing about what Adorno called the Culture Industry– it’s so cynical, every sameness is interpreted as “more of what we love” and every difference is interpreted as essential. The Voice of a Generation, and other hyperbole, is the bourgeois garbage of people so encapsulated by the spectacle that they literally feel like watching a TV show is part of living the good life.
@83 “she does not even live in the upper east side or in Manhattan for that fact, but in Brooklyn.” yeah? i paid $300 for rent in the midwest living off a gas station attendant’s salary. Cos that’s what people do in order not to die. What’s the rent in Williamsburg again? Sheesh, at least most people are cognizant of their privilege these days.
95. Trevor | May 1st, 2012 at 8:13 am
I think Rachel (number 83 up there) is either Dunham herself, an HBO marketing troll, or a carpetbagger. As in, moved to Brooklyn rather than born there. I’m married to a born and bred Brooklyn girl and she’s thankfully nothing like these characters.
Furthermore – Flatbush. Anyone familiar with it will recognize how it completely demolishes any argument that the Dunham experience is authentic.
96. Jeanne Quian Long | May 1st, 2012 at 8:45 am
I REALLY don’t like this show. I REALLY wish they would put shows on TV that I like. I am really mad about the bad TV shows that I don’t like on the TV and am also extremely angry about the general and dire implications that they have for the the world and society as a whole. I am PISSED. If this goes on much longer I might have try and think of something else to do
97. rk | May 1st, 2012 at 9:39 am
This was a great review of this baby-shit-beige garbage, Eileen, but have you read:
http://gawker.com/5904214/i-dont-want-a-baby-that-looks-like-that-a-girls-recap
It starts:
“The appropriate response to Girls, a television program about pretty young White Nationalists seeking abortions and love in the Big City, is silence. But we are in the noise business, and today is the 21st anniversary of the death of Johnny Thunders, so here is a recap.”
and just gets better from there.
98. Ozinator | May 1st, 2012 at 10:10 am
@97,
“WHEN WILL A REAL MAN COME ALONG TO FUCK GOV. GEORGE WALLACE IN A MANLY FASHION”? Brilliant!
99. gc | May 1st, 2012 at 10:14 am
@91
^ The battle cry of all self pitying bigots. “You just don’t understand!”
Ooh, “Very silly”. Now there’s a devastating bit of aloof analysis. You’ve totally convinced everybody that this discussion isn’t getting to you now!
Jesus Christ, David Brooks-speak in the Exiled comments section? Are you new here?
100. gc | May 1st, 2012 at 10:22 am
@94
^ Thank you.
101. Ozinator | May 1st, 2012 at 2:15 pm
@99
You’ve shown you don’t understand and appealing to the mob doesn’t change that. So I guess if I’m new and no one likes me, you feel better about your angry screed? It’s not getting to me, but it seems all the gold has been mined form this conversation. Did you want to yell at me again before we say farewell?
102. darthfader | May 1st, 2012 at 2:41 pm
It’s a sure bet for HBO – if their viewers have never been privileged enough to act as shitty and clueless as Dunham and her friends, they will all sure as hell rush to accept that lifestyle as their deepest impossible fantasy.
Sex and the City showed them the way to glory.
103. darthfader | May 1st, 2012 at 2:43 pm
@79
Is this really how old people think?
104. darthfader | May 1st, 2012 at 2:48 pm
Finally, I think it’s worth a mention that Allison Williams, the “best friend”, is the ultra-rich daughter of NBC newsdrone Brian Williams.
In fact, the Williams family might be the best way to sum up ‘Girls’: the entire media apparatus is designed to show us pretty rich white people playing pretend at real life
105. gc | May 1st, 2012 at 7:53 pm
@ 101
“I’m different from the other obsessive Jew haters! There are good reasons for my obsessive Jew hatred! (Which I don’t call Jew hatred.) If only you knew what I knew, you’d tell me I was a good person! I’m really a good person! Really!”
“Maybe if I rhetorically ask him if he wants to yell at me again, he won’t reply to me again!”
106. gc | May 1st, 2012 at 8:04 pm
@76
If that scene were in a different show, maybe not. In this show? Yes. The creators do want you to identify with the character; to identify with how she must suffer the shame and degradation of stealing a lowly housekeeping tip. (Never mind what it means to the housekeeping staff.)
Ditto the next scene, where she must suffer the unthinking cheerfulness of a homeless old black guy who, because he isn’t a young privileged white girl who’s just been cut off by her parents, doesn’t understand how painful life can truly be.
These are people who’s idea of satire is having Dunham’s boss fire her by telling her “I’m really going to miss your energy.” They don’t do subtle.
107. DeeboCools | May 1st, 2012 at 9:43 pm
I wish I could fuck some Jews.
108. Matt Cornell | May 1st, 2012 at 11:47 pm
“her nude doughy depressing body”
Seriously, you’re an asshole for writing that.
And you know, I come to this site hoping to read soothing, polite criticism, not asshole criticism. She really doesn’t deserve it either–just because she’s a hipster racist doesn’t mean you can make fun of her body. Hipster racists are people too you know
109. Harry | May 2nd, 2012 at 8:07 am
What happened to the fun shows on HBO/Showtime?
Can shows like Stargate, Outer Limits, and Six Feet Under ever come back to these networks?
110. Jesse | May 2nd, 2012 at 5:09 pm
I would hand flowers to the chick on the far left on the park bench.
111. splerk | May 2nd, 2012 at 5:12 pm
@107
Oh yeah. Jewish girls are the best. I mean that in the best possible way.
112. joshua | May 2nd, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Sorry man, I have this weird obsession with Jews. What was it Nietzsche said about anti-Semites again?
113. darthfader | May 2nd, 2012 at 8:38 pm
@110
That woman is made from the sperm of Brian Williams and you would get bounced off the asphalt by some ex-Ranger if you came within a yard of her.
114. Ozinator | May 3rd, 2012 at 6:56 am
“Is HBO’s Jewish-themed ‘Girls’ about young women’s struggles, or some women’s privileges”?
http://www.timesofisrael.com/chronicling-the-exploits-and-failings-of-millennials/
Interesting read
115. chabinga | May 3rd, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Ok I’m 54 and with all the boomer bashing going on I think I felt a little twinge of what it’s like to feel prejudice. I’m white middle class and never before felt that shit. So after reading here all about how loathesome boomers are I was at a bar and this old guy was playing guitar very well and inside I was like, FUCK YEAH. Old mutherfuckers can PLAY.
116. Mr. Bad | May 3rd, 2012 at 4:35 pm
ITT
Millennials eat their own, may lulz were had.
117. Ozinator | May 4th, 2012 at 9:12 am
questions, comments, gc?
118. gc | May 4th, 2012 at 5:40 pm
@117
What, about the article you linked to? Read it, twit. The word “Jewish” (or variations thereon) appears exactly three times – in the headline and in the following two sentences:
Focus on what’s important here. The fact that you’re a disgrace to humanity.
119. Emily | May 4th, 2012 at 10:27 pm
@108–*exactly*. there was so much ignorant, inappropriate vitriol directed towards these girls’ physical appearances and personal character. where is the well-reasoned, civil, acute criticism–the kind that I am exhibiting in this very comment? Standards people, standards.
120. D'Twaan | May 4th, 2012 at 11:56 pm
@119
Standards 101: More snapper
121. Ozinator | May 5th, 2012 at 5:40 am
gc,
The header was,
“Is HBO’s Jewish-themed ‘Girls’ about young women’s struggles, or some women’s privileges”?
THAT’S what’s important… as me pointing out the same thing is what caused your friend up top to call us “goyim”
So I’m a disgrace but this woman saying the same thing isn’t? Or how about your friend up top? Or how about you for answering the dinner bell and getting angry and projecting your nonsense?
122. gc | May 5th, 2012 at 3:56 pm
@121
pearl fiddler queen obviously resents non-Jewish people. And Dvora Meyers obviously either is a Jewish chauvinist or just really wanted to write about Girls and had to find a way to make it seem relevant to the publication for which she works.
But neither of them were hate-addled and/or generally dumb enough to produce an equivalent to your asserting that “attacking with ‘goyim’ while acting the victim and at the same time saying we’re all the same” is part of Jewish “culture”.
And even if they were, that wouldn’t make you any better. In fact, it would still leave you worse, since Jews still have some cause to be paranoid about non-Jews, while unless you’re a Middle Easterner, you have no cause to be paranoid about Jews at all, and you’re not a Middle Easterner.
Again, focus on what’s important here: What’s wrong with you.
123. bitchybitch | May 5th, 2012 at 8:23 pm
i find that the only good thing about most movies and tv is the pleasure i get from reading eviscerating reviews by critic and commoner alike.
the show is merely the voice of overprivileged JAPS (yeah, i fuckin’ said it!) who have friends in the film industry and suck the right studio cock to get their self-indulgent navel-gazing bullshit excreted onto my tv screen, nothing more.
and yes, it’s ok to insult her gross body, the fact that she’s allowed onscreen at all is a condescending and contrived effort to appeal to the fat-ugly-overeducated-slut demographic (mean but true, lots of dumb bitches with no self-esteem are loving this show and going “she’s so me!”).
Ew. Where’s the “dislike” button?
124. Fred Friendly | May 5th, 2012 at 10:09 pm
Folks, 121 comments and Apatow’s name is mentioned only once?
Apatow has become the Pope of “Romantic Comedy” in Hollywood. He’s a one-man multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Every “comedy star” mincing across your screen owes his/her career to this creep. Before Apatow’s dead, he’ll probably be personally responsible for more than $1 trillion in revenue. So of course The Machine is going to trumpet anything he’s involved with. They’re all wholly-owned subsidiaries.
And Apatow’s the reason this thing is on the air. “Girls” is totally degrading to women (even the title!) — like all of Apatow’s work. Look at anything he’s been involved with: always a sweet candy with a lump of sh*t in the middle. Endless dick jokes and other trash talk, vomiting scenes, repulsive dialog that has no basis in reality, all designed to shock and provoke, always summoning the lowest of all possible imagery in the viewer’s mind.
Apatow is to movies (and now TV) as P Diddy is to rap music. Kiss the ring, baby. Lena Dunham is just a young woman with a limited point-of-view, doing her thing, trying to get rich and famous like all young people would (if they could). She’s even willing to get naked and have fake sex on camera to get what she wants. But none of it would be there without Apatow. You better believe he has final script approval.
We saw Apatow’s “The 5 Year Engagement” tonight. The movie takes on role reversal in post-feminist America, a topic worth discussing in a romantic comedy. Jason Segel and Emily Blunt are sweet actors and fun to watch. But along the way, it’s the usual Apatow serving of verbal pornographic spew, references to child genitalia, vomiting, dick jokes, and other totally unbelievable dialog. Sadly, people are laughing at this slag. So maybe Apatow has a point.
And of course the Brits! Always the Brits. I’ve been in New York for over 25 years, working with thousands of people in the loftiest job positions, and I can count the number of Brits I’ve met on the fingers of one hand. But this “entertainment” flings Brits at us as though they were lurking on every corner, lording it over us inferior Americans.
Go study your neurolinguistic programming. Then you’ll understand what Apatow is up to: the sucking of American consciousness into the slime and muck. It’s very deliberate and very precise. All part of the plan.
125. CensusLouie | May 5th, 2012 at 11:22 pm
Rachel: marketing whore or just straight up troll?
I’m not sure which is more laughable, dismissing criticism because we’re jealous of not having rich parents (“Quit making fun of the Koch brothers! You’re just jealous YOU aren’t billionaires!”), the idea that these girl AREN’T overprivileged brats simply because they live in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan, or the assumption that no one else has any insight to NYC.
I can’t imagine how much of an insulated, cowardly, spoiled brat you’d have to be in order to consider Greenpoint a “bad” neighborhood. For christsake it’s right next door upriver from Williamsburg, the gentrified mecca for lily white trust funds who want to feel like they’re “cultured” and “slumming it” but are too cowardly to move into neighborhoods with actual Brooklyn natives that they’ve priced out (and god forbid you stray more than 2 miles from Manhattan). Try living east/south of central Bushwick, THEN maybe you can moan about crappy living conditions.
126. hey joe | May 6th, 2012 at 7:30 am
I watched the preview. May not be my kind of show but it doesnt look terrible. or maybe that;s because I’ve been living in Russia for the last 10 years and my standards have dropped.
127. DeeboCools | May 6th, 2012 at 8:00 am
What is a jew? It’s just a white person, right?
128. radii | May 6th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
@127 Albert Einstein said it best (I’ll paraphrase) – being Jewish is to have a shared set of histories and cultural values … this famous scientist was courted again and again to become the leader of Israel and he refused – he was openly hostile to zionism and favored sharing the land … he did not agree that being a Jew was defined by ethnicity, race, religion, nationality
129. chabinga | May 6th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Solution to anti-Semitism: everybody claims to be Jewish. You don’t need a Jewish sounding last name because it’s about your mom. You don’t have to learn any special stuff or practice religion. Plenty of Jews aren’t religious. You don’t have to look Jewish because there really isn’t any certain Jewish look. There are even Ethiopian Jews. Just say your mom told you she was Jewish.
130. nestore | May 6th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Televison FUCKING BLOWS!!!ALL OF IT!!! stop watching it…its worthless..all of it..just-stop-watching-the-stupid-fucking-shit-on-TV
131. gc | May 6th, 2012 at 6:03 pm
@124
You are, of course, right about everything.
A comforting thought: Popular culture was similarly ravaged by John Hughes in the 80s and early 90s – but he eventually went away.
132. Mr. Bad | May 6th, 2012 at 8:01 pm
REVISED COMMENT:
ITT
Jewish Millennials eat their own, may lulz were had.
Also:
A Jew is a white person who thinks the crusader states were a not such a bad idea, maybe just a tad meshugana. Any jew who doesn’t think so is just an especially self righteous American
133. Ozinator | May 7th, 2012 at 8:53 am
@122,
Thanks for calming down a bit. I dislike appealing to authority on anything which can readily be understood by reasonable people but as discussing Jewish identity IS taboo, understand that there are plenty of Jews who will tell you the same thing I have. This isn’t to say it’s irrational or evil either, e.g., When Jews somewhere are being hurt, Jews the world over get in touch with their Jewishness, even if they are secular. Stay with me here…
“Goyim” isn’t a typical slur and has meaning beyond what you may find in a dictionary merely calling it a disparaging remark for non-Jews. The kind of person who would use it in the way Pearl Fiddler did has a choseness complex that is NOT merely a personal trait and found in all cultures. It’s not even a non-secular Jewish exclusive complex. But certainly a Jewish cultural one and not shared by all Jews (ironically, those identifying as Jews who don’t feel above all others,i.e.,”chosen”, are often Jews who DO primarily identify as religious Jews). Now feeling victimized or that the next victimization is on the horizon I think a lot of “goyim” wouldn’t find weird…but selling persecution while believing you are above all other whites at the same time enjoying white (if not Jewish) privilege AND fancying yourself a multicultural liberal, really does seem strange to a lot of “goyim”. Remember that that was in response to the misplaced question posed to me after my comment about the article sounding strange for merely saying it was a show about white girls. No, The kind of libertarians/supremacists you mentioned are not interested in and are quite against multiculturalism…their counterparts are easier to find in Israel than in liberal Jewish enclaves in New York. Also, it’s the operating inside a larger white paradigm while believing your smaller group is chosen. Maybe Mormons would be the closest example one could find but that’s not the same either and I’m pretty sure ex-mormons are just that and don’t start “Atheist Mormons against Utah” groups.
It’s nice that you are sensitive to the supremacist’s emotions, but you should understand better where Pear Fiddler is coming from and not assume that all of his/her outrage is sincere or worthy of your defense.
I think your take/attack on Devora Meyers is as ignorant as your attack on me and worse, is shaped by your opinions of me. It just goes back to my original comment before being attacked by Pearl Fiddler. It seems to be a show written by Jewish girls about Jewish girls and I found it weird that it wasn’t described that way but about how it misrepresented white girls and how black girls shouldn’t want to be part of it. Maybe we can get Pearl to tell Eileen that it WAS about black girls because you know, everyone is everyone.
134. gc | May 7th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Okay, you’re confused. I mean, that’s been obvious since your first comment here. But you’re also confused in a different way.
“Libertarian” and “racial/cultural supremacist” are not mutually inclusive. There are plenty of libertarians who are happy for the world to be run by people of any race, color, or creed, so long as they agree that plutocracy (which they won’t admit is plutocracy) is a good thing.
I’m not defending pearl fiddler. I’m attacking you.
No it doesn’t, you monomaniac.
Oh, I hadn’t and haven’t calmed down a bit, Heinrich.
135. Ozinator | May 7th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
riiiiight
136. good show | May 8th, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Why resort to attacking offhand comment of Dunham’s body if I feel I have an intellectual critique of said offhand comment? It undermines my entire comment. Yep, that’s how it works.
137. hey joe | May 9th, 2012 at 4:47 am
Stop hating on the Jooz!!! We are smarter, richer, and more creative, learn to live with it. Impossible to disprove, and you know it.
138. gc | May 9th, 2012 at 6:09 pm
@108
No Eileen isn’t.
The critics who called Dunham “brave” are the assholes. Eileen is simply saying what they meant, removing the veneer of euphemism and sentimentality.
Sure you can.
There’s nothing physically wrong with her body. She ends up looking doughy and depressing (or if you prefer, “brave”) because she can’t or won’t carry that body with a shred of aplomb. Her cringing posture would make any body look bad. You’d just have to slightly change the adjectives. (e.g. “scrawny and depressing”, “jagged and depressing”, “bland and depressing”.)
Admittedly, Eileen’s choice of words does risk giving undeserved injury to all fat people, whether they put their bodies to good use or not.
139. MST | May 11th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
The voice of a generation? My daughter is about the same age as the women on this show. She works as a teacher in a large city (not NYC). She loves her job and is engaged to be married. She has concerns and issues like all of us, but she is basically happy. And (horrors) — she goes to church!
In other words, she is not like the women of this show at ALL!
140. ct | May 11th, 2012 at 1:38 pm
no one i know that is unsuccessful is living anywhere near the city (and im in chicago, a much better city to be poor in.) they’re out in the sticks or midwestern steel landfills being alcoholics and working at the gas station. eating out a couple times a week at most, scrounging shit off craigslist and dumpsters, taking advantage of nice friends. maybe writing shitty fiction or playing in a shitty country band, if they’re lucky.
maybe i’ll write a script about a 19 yr old getting pregnant and trying to maintain her dream of going to community college and becoming a cop. but the catch is that that girl wouldn’t want your pity.
141. alex | May 19th, 2012 at 7:51 am
hold on where does it say that all tv shows must follow some set of guidelineswhen it comes to being diverse what the hell. Why is it that today we pick on white tv shows but i dont see anyone talking about Tyler Perrys shows for not blending in white america to be diverse enough face it people will find any reason to bitch about anything we all try to be so politically correct now adays itz bullshit really i tell you what how about i start a tv channel called WET white entertainment televsion would i be called a racist hmmm stop cryinv about Girls and analyzing it dont watch it then!!!!!!
142. anon | May 21st, 2012 at 10:10 pm
“ha maybe i’m just a pollyanna but i feel like most of the hate this show earns is totally misplaced. the writers, to me, seem to be totally in on the joke of how petty and self-induced these characters’ “problems” are.”
Who the fuck cares whether the writers are in on their own joke (?) or not? Is that supposed to be justification for throwing this pablum onto the air?
The show is tone-deaf, humorless, overwritten and the few values it celebrates are cold and cruel ones. No one gives a two-penny toss how self-aware and meta the writers may be (and Lord knows the lonely fuckers are used to entertaining themselves). What we care about is whether the show is good or not.
143. Joey Fudgefirst | May 22nd, 2012 at 10:51 pm
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for being (apparently) the only reviewer to review this show for what it actually is.
144. Kristina | May 23rd, 2012 at 3:01 am
“Voice of a generation”
They are fightin’ words, Ms. Jones, It’s just…who do I fight about it? I’m a 20-something woman who has always known what I want to do with my life and I work hard every day to achieve it. And my 20-something friends are similar. I don’t know anyone like these girls in real life, but here they are paraded out like the be-all-end-all of folks my age. There’s a lot of us who are passionate, driven, aren’t bored by sex. Take my word over HBO, please, someone….
145. db | May 23rd, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Thank you for this review! Finally someone cuts through the hype. The show is a hipster shit-fest; even worse, it’s boring. However, it’s lack of “diversity” shouldn’t surprise, after all, this is HBO we’re talking about…
146. Pissy | May 24th, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Thanks for fuck all other than the fact you hate the show.
I’m pretty sure I would hate the show too, though it’s not because there are no “blacks” in it but because it sounds like shite.
Do you sit with a clipboard and pen ticking ethnicity boxes when you watch TV?
Stop being so goddamn American.
147. balls mcballs | May 24th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
WaaaahhhhH!!!! I’m a white whiner who feels persecuted because I can’t be pro-white. Waaaahhhhhhhh!!! I am the most persecuted person on earth!!!
148. HBO Blow | May 31st, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Ms. Jones may have invented the term ‘mumblecore,’ but Doughy Dunham has more success than she’ll ever have. Season 2 has been greenlighted whilst Ms. Jones envy trolls patrol the the comment webz, getting paid $5.95 per hour. And we have to pay for our own internet connections, too.!
149. Ozinator | June 7th, 2012 at 11:12 pm
What 148 is trying to say is…
“Hahaha, loser! Do you know who my dad is? You will be serving fries to my kids! I’m a very important person”.
150. 22yroldgirl | June 10th, 2012 at 11:38 pm
I really do not agree with anything you said Ms. Jones. You may not think these characters are respectable, but unfortunately they represent a very real group of people. There are very few shows that illuminate the trivial boring lives of overpriviledged white kids in America like girls. This show exposes an entire generation’s chronic dissatisfaction. And as far as being rascist or unrealistic, why must every ethnic group be represented? That is not how the world works. Rich white girls are friends with other rich white girls…did you not attend high school? Probably not, seeing that you are a professor at UC Berkeley while I’m a pathetic anonymous commenter on a zine featured in Vanity Fair and on TV
151. o0o | June 12th, 2012 at 12:46 pm
i’m gathering “mumblecore” is something like Tao Lin but movies instead of books?
i did catch one episode of this show and laughed loud at the old-man balls: a rich, loamy source of humor which not even the tireless Adam Sandler managed to exhaust.
152. Seymour Hampton | June 28th, 2012 at 9:00 pm
HBO’s “GIRLS” turned me gay. I now have no interest in women whatsoever.
153. Becky "G" | June 30th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
The only reason this sleaze is on the air – and declared “important” – is that it upholds all the P.C./B.S. totems such as fretting over AIDS risk via heterosexual sex.
It’s the middlebrow equivalent to a Sarah Lawrence gender studies colloquium.
154. Jorge Espinoza | June 30th, 2012 at 12:55 pm
Funny how these “nuclear winter” series (e.g. ‘2 Broke Girls’) Hollywood produces about the new Depression Era always blame the Wall Street bogeyman.
Why don’t we ever hear about “their” blame? It’s as if our media monopoly was foreign to epic greed, a shallow culture of material excess, shabby ethics, and even sleazier business practices.
155. Disgusted | July 2nd, 2012 at 12:25 am
You can hate the show. You can hate the (perceived) racism. That’s fine. But don’t hate on someone’s “doughy, depressing body.” That’s just (perceived) doughism and makes me feel so disgusted with myself, why must you remind me of…well, I’m too disgusted to tell you…The fact that I come on here and get really angry about your white doughism, but dismiss (perceived) racism really exposes the caliber of the person commenting here. It also makes me sound a bit racist and doughy.
In general, the bacon bits spitting from my mouth throuhout this comment is rather off-putting and disgusting.
156. Karli | September 10th, 2012 at 5:28 pm
I Love that show!! Don’t care what you say.
157. Smoke | September 19th, 2012 at 12:02 am
WoW……. I have nothing better to devote my time on than trolling this blog and commenting on your article. There is always some website out there that people can relate too. This one might not be my cup of tea… So I should get over it and find a different website instead of spending all this negative energy commenting on an article that is physically hurting me in my butt. I should just click to another site ….. thankfully I’m not one of those idiots who uses the cliche about “it’s about freedom of speech.” So I’ll try to move on and get a life!
158. JFArt | September 19th, 2012 at 7:28 pm
I love this site! And I hate my job working PR trolling social media to boost this shitty fucking show Girls. Truth is, I wish Girls would get hit by a hantavirus outbreak it sucks so badly.
159. JFArt | September 19th, 2012 at 7:33 pm
That is not what I wrote at all.
160. jofjkack | September 30th, 2012 at 8:33 am
this author is bitter
and so am i bc i think the tv show isn’t bad
161. megan | October 14th, 2012 at 5:09 pm
Its a crap tv show and I am here on behalf of the social media PR firm hired by Girls to go around trying to blunt criticism of what’s really a shitty and evil show. Tell me how I’m doing, my boss will appreciate it!
162. KIMMIKU | November 17th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
This article is horrible. It’s just scolding without argumentation. The emptiness of your opinion irritates me. And yet, not a single fuck was given.
on the side, I have a strong presumption that you yourself are quite a boring broad. and a bit homely looking too? I flamed you good right? Gossip girl good?
163. poopy pants | December 5th, 2012 at 8:01 pm
It’s poop TV, but entertaining poop TV. come on guys, who would bone Lena Dunham? I know I would. After a few spliffs, would be trippy and good.
164. OhYeahThatisGold | December 16th, 2012 at 12:23 pm
I couldn’t decide which was worse…the one show I watched of Girls or the annoying commercials. This article, however, made it all worth wile.
165. Tiffany | December 26th, 2012 at 1:47 am
I hate this show as well. What made me even more depressed was when my friend who studied in New York for 4 years told me that she knew a lot of people who behaved and talked like this. There’s a lot of despicable characters on TV, but even a serial killer is more interesting to watch.
166. Chris | January 1st, 2013 at 1:32 am
Ah, politics, politics. Who cares. My only problem with the show? It’s not funny. The jokes are stupid. End of discussion.
167. Nikki | January 9th, 2013 at 1:56 pm
So, I happen to enjoy Girls. I didnt at first. I thought it was dark. I was expecting the uppity Sex and the City but for the younger generation. That said, I love this show because not only is it filmed really well, written honestly and cast perfectly, but even through the darkness is inspiration. Im an actress, and I can see the values in it that perhaps you and others personally can not. Its nothing to write about. Its a show. Its a form of entertainment. Its something for those who can relate. If not, turn on one of the other 5000 channels on tv. I say good for Lena. Sure, shes homely, but she does it well and with a comedic twist. She uses what shes got and thats all any of us can do.
Eileen, your article however well written, is just as dark and bleak as what you say you don’t like about the show. I would venture to call you hypocritical.
You dont inspire, you actually conspire.
And why bring race into something like this? Its the poeple who bring up “oh there are no blacks in this movie” that see the color difference. Were all people and everyone, black, white, brown, yellow, green have our own personal issues, and of course the bulk of issues that is created from ignorant opinions, such as racism.
My point is, relax. This is just one story, if you dont like it, dont like it, but please don’t preach about how this one show is the hideous end all. Its a little dramatic and mumblecore. 😉
168. Angie | January 11th, 2013 at 1:46 am
Good LORD, HBO please, please, please cancel this POS and that nasty, fugly, bigger POS Lena Dunham. I had the awful experience of hearing that rancid brat speak on the wonderful Craig Ferguson show. At one point, she called dogs stupid. Craig Ferguson was stunned, and he tried to make a feeble joke out of it… What type of c*nt hates dogs? This c*nt
–> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Dunham
FYI, Sex in the City has been done and it was colorful, witty and a (general) joy to watch. I’d rather watch my turds happily float in the bowl than watch ‘Girls’. ‘Nuff said?
169. horrible show | January 14th, 2013 at 7:39 am
This show is so horrible I recorded and watched most of an episode then deleted the rest on my dvr. Its crap and not interesting and characters and story show all suck. I cant believe HBO renewed it. They must have been forced or had nothing else to put in the time slot. So they figured this worthless crap is better than nothing WRONG! Wrong! Sooooooo disappointed with this show.
170. Jack | January 14th, 2013 at 8:32 am
Those who decry the “lack of diversity” on this show never mention the overwhelming amount of Jews on the show – and in Hollywood.
171. get over it | January 17th, 2013 at 2:17 pm
I AM SO SICK AND TIRED OF WHITE PEOPLE TELLING THE WORLD WHEN WE SHOULD HAVE A PROBLEM WITH RACE! THE ONLY PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT PC OR GIRLS….ARE WHITE PEOPLE! WHY DON’T YOU LET PEOPLE OF COLOR SPEAK ABOUT HOW THEY FEEL FOR THEMSELVES! SHUT UP! I LIKE THE SHOW AND I HAPPEN TO BE ONE BLACK OPINION. THERE WAS SEX AND THE CITY AND PEOPLE LOVED THAT SHIT BUT GIRLS YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH!? HELLO…THERE WAS ALREADY AN ANSWER TO THE LACK OF DIVERSITY IN LADY LAND…THE SHOW ‘GIRLFRIENDS’!! ALL BLACK CAST OF WOMEN BESTIES. iF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO CROSS COMPARISONS YOU NEED TO INCLUDE GIRLFRIENDS IN THAT OTHERWISE YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THE TOPIC YOU HAVEN’T DONE YOUR HOMEWORK AND DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT! NEXT, THE SHOW IS ABOUT AN INTIMATE GROUP OF FOUR FRIENDS TWO OF WHOM ARE RELATED AND ALL OF WHICH LOOK JEWISH TO ME SO NO THERE MIGHT NOT BE A BROWN PERSON IN THAT PARTICULAR SMALL GROUP. NOT EVERY GROUP OF FRIENDS HAS A BLACK GIRL AND IF LENA ADDED ONE Y’ALL WOULD JUST CALL HER A TOKEN ANYWAY! I CAN SEE IF THE CAST STARTED TO EXPAND TO CO-WORKERS AND FRIENDS-OF-FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS BUT UNTIL THEN IT IS PERFECTLY REALISTIC FOR A TINY CORE GROUP TO CONTAIN ONLY PLAIN LOOKING JEWISH-ESQUE GIRLS. FUCK OFF! I HATE ALL THE WHITE PEOPLE THAT COMPLAIN ABOUT THE LACK OF DIVERSITY ON THE SHOW THAT’S WHAT I HATE! SINCE WHEN WERE DATING TROUBLES AND VIRGINITY AND MONEY AND PARENTS AND JOBS EXCLUSIVELY WHITE HIPSTER ISSUES? SO BLACK ISSUES ARE JUST HIV AND WEED AND POVERTY! FUCK OFF! SOME BLACKS ARE YOUNG AND MIDDLE CLASS AND GOING THROUGH WHAT THE SHOW DEPICTS. SOME BLACKS ARE VERY MODERN AND IN TUNE WITH CURRENT EVENTS. ALSO SOME YOUNG BLACKS ARE DATING WHITES AND MAY FIND THEMSELVES IN THIS WORLD SUDDENLY SO THE SHOW MIGHT SPEAK TO THEM. IT’S ONE EXAMPLE OF A CLUSTER OF EXPERIENCES. I CAN RELATE TO SOME THINGS AND OTHERS NOT SO MUCH. IT IS ENTERTAINMENT NOT A DOCUMENTARY FUCKTARDS GO WATCH REAL HOUSEWIVES IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT. PEOPLE JUST HATE LENA BECAUSE SHE’S NOT A PERFECT 10. THE WHITE ARROGANCE THAT THEY CAN WRITE ARTICLE AFTER ARTICLE ON ANOTHER GROUP’S BEHALF IS HILARIOUS.
172. Dee | January 17th, 2013 at 2:42 pm
I thought I was the only person who hated this show!I love SATC how can they say it is that good??? The characters are neither funny or interesting zzzzzzz. I live in the UK and the media love it. Yuk
173. get over it | January 17th, 2013 at 3:16 pm
ANOTHER THING…WHY IS IT THAT ONLY BLACKS ARE BEING TARGETED AS NOT BEING REPRESENTED THERE ARE JUST AS MANY HISPANIC AND/OR LATINO PEOPLE IN NYC ALONG WITH EVERY OTHER NATIONALITY ON THE PLANET! ADDING A PUERTO RICAN CAST MEMBER WOULD BE JUST AS WELL. ALL THE WOMEN OF THE WORLD ARE THROWING UP THEIR HANDS SAYING THAT’S NOT ME ON SCREEN I DON’T ACT LIKE THAT….YES YOU DO!! OH IF I COULD HAVE RECORDED ALL THE HAPPY HOURS AND DINNER PARTIES AND COLLEGE PARTIES WHERE HORRIBLE GIRLS ACTED WAY WORSE THAN THE ONES ON THE SHOW. GIRL-TALK AS IT’S CALLED IS ACTUALLY POTENTIALLY HORRIBLE AND THE SHOW IS NOT AS BAD AS SOME REAL LIFE CONVERSATIONS I HAVE WITNESSED. AND IN ALL THESE CASES I WAS THE ONLY PERSON OF COLOR IN THE ROOM. HOWEVER IF YOU MADE A SHOW ABOUT THE DIALOGUE OF THE CONVERSATIONS I’VE WITNESSED WITH OTHER LADIES OF COLOR IT WOULD BE JUST AS BAD AND SHALLOW AT TIMES! GIRLS LET THEIR GUARD DOWN AND BEHAVE BADLY WITH ONE ANOTHER SOMETIMES AND THE SHOW DEPICTS THAT. LADIES OF THE WORLD ARE JUST TERRIFIED THAT THEY ARE BEING FOUND OUT. I AM DISGUSTED WITH THE WAY EILEEN JONES (I AM ASSUMING AN OLDISH WHITE LADY) ADDRESSED THE TOPIC OF RACE AND ADDRESSED PEOPLE OF COLOR, ALL COLORS IN THIS ARTICLE. LIKE SHE IS SOME INSIDER WITH A PASS AND WE ARE JUST SO DEFENSELESS SHE HAS TO PROTECT US FROM THE SHOW. FUCK OFF AND DON’T EVER TELL ME WHAT TO DO OR LIKE OR SEE!
174. tom murphy | January 30th, 2013 at 2:36 pm
well, with criticism like this, you can rest assured that no woman who is not a “10” in the patriarchy’s book will EVER have the gall to try to express herself again.
Congrats
Ouch! Betcha that really hurt. Happy now, oppressor?! H’m?
Sanctimoniously yours,
Tom Thumbdick
175. zang | February 1st, 2013 at 11:47 am
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who thinks this show is tripe. I watched it because my wife heard it was a great show. I don’t have the anger about it that a lot of people seem to have, but I also have no desire to ever watch it again. The only thing that kept me from being 100% bored was the irritating characters. I guess I was 90% bored, 10% irritated. Putting all the racist stuff aside, this show just plain sucks.
176. Ellen | February 4th, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Couldn’t agree more. This show is just so depressing …. “Finally, a show for the overweight insecure ‘smart’ girl who angrily believes she deserves to be admired for her snarky insights while forever demeaning herself in the quest for a boyfriend….” We all know women like Hannah – they’re simultaneously sad and irritating, and we try to politely get out of the conversation when they accost us at work to talk about themselves. Who wants to watch a show about that girl unless you are that girl. Maybe there are a way more of those girls out there than I thought.
177. Ralph | February 6th, 2013 at 12:29 pm
I just love it when commenters think they have a way of really stickin’ it to a reviewer who hurt them. Thank you AEC for making sure that commenters like this are reeducated
178. Alter_idem | February 22nd, 2013 at 6:50 am
The good thing about all of this is that people can love this show or hate it and there will always be at least a few people who people who agree.
179. rss | March 19th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
I am way, way, way older than the audience for the show and probably for this conversation, but reading most of the comments (after watching a few episodes of the show and reading the “critics” going ga-ga) restores my belief that, to paraphrase, “the millenials are all right!” Your revulsion mirrors mine, which put me in a funk because I did NOT want to believe that the show as anything but the expression of an overprivileged, clueless, spoiled white girl.
Thanks y’all. I know the world will be okay in your hands.
180. Jerome | March 22nd, 2013 at 8:40 am
Good news: nobody actually watches this show, except people who hate it…and TV critics.
181. Kalahari | March 27th, 2013 at 9:23 am
I can’t help but notice a pattern–a fiction show about privileged white women airs. a few years later it is followed by a more real-life based show on privileged white women on a rival network:
The O.C.–>Laguna Beach, the HIlls, etc.
Gossip Girl–>Girls and whatever’s next.
Desperate Housewives–>real housewives of LA, NYC, ATL, etc.
I feel like modern TV looked at 80s evening soaps and said, let’s have women act even more shamefully, and at a 10-20 years younger age.
And I am over gross Apatow creations. Wow, women can be as gross and immature as men? No freaking way. what a MF revelation!
I am passing on ever watching Girls. I am really OVER NYC masturbating about its natives lives everywhere you look. What would be a piece of shite anywhere else is genius coming out of NYC.
182. Poop | March 28th, 2013 at 1:47 am
I thought it was funny (the show, that is).
183. dweeb | September 14th, 2013 at 9:32 pm
I agree that Girls is as awful as you write. In other words, most of my unedited comment was pointless. Thank you, AEC.
184. Molly | October 18th, 2013 at 8:06 am
Well, I watched 1 1/2 episodes last night, and found this article after Googling “girls is depressing “. But it’s not THAT bad. I’m a white 24 year old girl but as I am nothing like any of the characters (thank god) I am just not expecting to relate to them, so she may be the “voice if my generation ” but I’m not letting her speak for me if I can help it. Also, in the first episode, the virginal dork Shoshanna has that book addressing women as “the ladies “: who are the ladies?! Not us! Is the consensus, so I doubt that Dunham was not unaware of the irony. I’m gonna force myself to watch it again tonight : maybe I’ll keep a bucket next to me in case I have to puke my guts out when that despicable skinny white boy Adam rears his head!
185. Rammuel | November 30th, 2013 at 9:00 pm
I just came across this article while searching “Why do hipsters hate GIRLS TV show and/or Lena Dunham” and I gotta say, this is some of the funniest comments I’ve read yet. Loved Dunham’s movie and I love her show even more. And I’m not some privileged, twenty-something white girl: I’m just a fan of people who have something interesting to say. Lena Dunham has something to say. And if you read “Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America” by Tanner Colby then you’ll see that Max Reed’s analysis of GIRLS’ “lack” of racial diversity hits the nail right on the head.
186. David | January 16th, 2014 at 10:49 am
I don’t get why a show is bad because it has no black people in it. There are plenty of shows with no white people. Our country is obsessed with making sure every picture, tv show or movie meets some racial formula. Look at any promotional picture for a school. They have to include one of each race. Of course if you go to that school you will see a much different distribution and it is rare that clicks are are divided into same color groups. It is odd to have a mixed race close nit group. I know they exist but they are rare. When they do happen it is not even. You will see one token color included in a group of another color. That is just how life happens it is not racist.
187. T. Mitchell | January 17th, 2014 at 9:57 pm
The show is an extremely narrow slice of as seen through its creator and star. I only recently viewed a few episodes, as I wanted to see what all the “hoopla” was about – not much as it turns out. Great music and cinematography. The characters are unlikeable, the story lines are dull, and Dunham is one of the most unattractive women to grace the small screen in awhile.
She belongs behind the scenes, not in front of it. I hope she can hurdle her self obsession enough to leverage her writing ability to create more worthy product. And I honestly thought this show was a parody or satire, lol
188. Erk | December 5th, 2014 at 8:54 am
This article is so completely exactly what I wanted to read. Not only was it that, but the points made in the article were totally accurate and supported by evidence! I love it when people see through to the core of a situation, and this article’s author has completely pinned what is wrong with this show. The comments on Ken Tucker gave me a triumph-like satisfaction from the show’s defeat. Self-deprecating people are often the most self-absorbed, and the author knows this.
189. Rattegif | January 2nd, 2015 at 5:01 pm
I was agreeing on everything till you started bitching about diversity and a white cast
190. Anna Maria B. | April 3rd, 2016 at 1:45 pm
This article is so true. The characters on this show are whiny, self-absorbed, despicable human beings who speak a mile a minute and end ALL of their sentences with interrogative inflection. How very grating — and how lucky we are that this is not an actual depiction of actual twenty-somethings. I do not understand the appeal of this show.
191. R. Alex | July 25th, 2016 at 2:19 am
Dunham tries way to hard to be clever.
192. michael | June 22nd, 2017 at 12:20 pm
Show is complete garbage. NYC girls do not act like this. These jewish girls are rich and privileged and annoying. When NYC people see girls like this on the train, they move to another train.
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